The building maintenance scheduled for Friday February 27th at 5:00pm MST has been postponed until 5:00pm March 6th. PSD's website will be down during the maintenance.

ESRL Hosts Dynamics of the MJO Workshop (DYNAMO)

April 14, 2009

PSD's Chris Fairall speaks to workshop participants

Workshop attendees

The Earth System Research Laboratory hosted a two-day workshop on
Dynamics of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (DYNAMO) April 13-14, 2009, in
Boulder, CO. DYNAMO is a proposed US contribution to an international
investigation of the formation of the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO) in
the Equatorial Indian Ocean. Representatives from the Japan Agency for
Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) joined a team of US
Scientists to work on details of a cooperative field effort.

The MJO is a huge cluster of equatorially-centered, intermittent deep
convection that migrates from West to East around the planet. At any
tropical ocean location, an MJO goes by every 30-60 days. MJO is the most
important source of intraseasonal variability of the Earth's climate
system. It is known to trigger the onset of the summer Monsoon in Asia and
American and features strongly as a source of moisture for the Atmospheric
Rivers that dominate major rainfall events on the US West Coast. MJO
typically blossoms in the Indian Ocean and then heads towards the Pacific
where it influences US weather and climate. Thus, it is hypothesized that
the dynamics of the MJO in the Indian Ocean is a key to advancing
predictability of Pacific convective events. A group of NOAA, Department of
Energy, Office of Naval Research, and university researchers met at
NOAA-Boulder to discuss plans for US research ship and aircraft to join a
major Japanese study near the Maldives
in the winter of 2011-2012.

MJO is a major problem for climate models. In most models it is poorly
represented, propagates at the wrong speed, or is absent completely.
Because MJO plays a key role rainfall variability, in triggering Monsoons,
and has also been implicated in initiating El Niño, improvements in its
representation in models is critical.